I am on the server right now, and there are two of me. How would this be possible?

EDIT: To elaborate, there is another person on the server using my name. I am not controlling him but we are on at the same time.

EDIT2: He has just disappeared

"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."

hhyloc wrote:I think it's because you're not completely disconnected from the server since the last time you logged on, it may happen from time to time. This also occurs to me in other multiplayer games.

Not that, he was an active player.

He didn't do any harm other than impersonating me, joining a game I was observing, then leaving after recruiting a castle full of nonsense but maybe some measures should be taken against this.

"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."

shadowmaster wrote:I imagine they may have been using an uppercase i instead of a lowercase L.

pauxlo wrote:Maybe it would be useful to use a font which clearly differentiates these (and other) characters, at least for user names?

To prevent confusion of "visually similar" names, maybe the game should display a graphical icon next to each user name. From each user name a hash value would be calculated, and the icon would be selected by the hash value. So visually similar names would usually have different hash values, and therefore different icons. (Now if you remember the icons for your friends, you recognize when someone is impersonating them, or just has a similar name.)

For example, if I play as "Viliam", someone else may play as "Villiam". But hashcode of "Viliam" will be e.g. 34784830 and hashcode of "Villiam" will be e.g. 09409277. Let's have a library of say 100 icons, chosen by last two digits of hashcode. The icon #30 is e.g. a red skull, icon #77 is a white sword. So one player will be displayed as "Viliam [red skull]", another one as "Villiam [white sword]". You will not confuse them.

A quick way to make many icons would be to make a few pictures in one color (skull, shield, sword, mace, bow, arrow, knife, coin, heart, star) and display them in different colors (white, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, cyan, green, brown, gray), which already makes 100 combinations. By displaying two icons after name, we have 10000 combinations. (More than two icons would probably look too chaotic.)

Avatars generated from a hash are actually a common feature on many blogs, particularly those using Wordpress, which uses the Gravatar system. It's not outside the realm of possibility that there's already an open-source implementation floating around which could be used.

Gravatar has the little weakness (for the goal of avoiding fakes) that each user can upload his own icon (like my one: ). An impersonator thus could simply choose the same icon as the impersonated person.

Thus our system should not allow this, if the goal is avoiding mixing different users.